Was Francis Bacon made in Monaco?

One evening in the late Eighties, I was walking down Brompton Road in South Kensington, when I saw a figure turning in the doorway of a late-night chemist. His face, caught in the neon glare, was pale and oddly ageless, and in the split-second that our eyes met I glimpsed an expression that was at once impassive and strangely haunted.

Francis Bacon, I thought, without breaking my stride.

Bacon, who must by then have been about 80, had lived in that area of London for decades, and was long since established as the greatest and most controversial British painter of the 20th century. Since his death in 1992, the Bacon industry has grown ever larger, leading to increasingly detailed speculation about both the meaning of his harrowing, morally ambivalent paintings, and his rackety private life in the gay clubs and seedy drinking dens of post-war London.

Francis Bacon in Nice, March 1979Credit:
Eddy Batache/MB Art

Yet there remain whole aspects of his life about which we know very little. Not least among them is the three-year period in the late Forties when Bacon lived in Monaco. This barely chronicled moment is the subject of a major new exhibition at the Grimaldi Forum in Monte Carlo: Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture.

“We know almost nothing about Bacon before 1960,” says Martin Harrison, curator of the exhibition and editor of the monumental catalogue raisonné of Bacon’s works that is being published concurrently. “But when you put the evidence together, you’re forced to the conclusion that Francis Bacon, as we understand him today, was formed in Monaco.”

Walking now through a somewhat antiseptic pedestrian precinct, just a couple of hundred yards from Monte Carlo’s famous casino, I’m struggling to imagine what might have drawn Bacon to this manicured, high-security tax haven. Gravity-defying highways course between well-appointed tower-blocks and the belle époque villas sprouting from the slopes of this Mediterranean principality. There’s the atmosphere of discretion and anonymity you’d expect of a place with the highest property prices in Europe, but there’s little in the way of street-life; the few restaurants and shops are expensive, but oddly characterless. What, beyond the casino – and Bacon was an inveterate gambler – could have attracted the great connoisseur of the more sordid aspects of metropolitan life to this strangely sterile place? Documents show that Bacon moved here from London in July 1946, setting up home in the Hôtel de Ré in an unlikely ménage à trois with his lover of the time, Eric Hall, and his nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, who had nursed him through childhood asthma and remained his closest companion until her death in 1951.

“The warm weather was good for his asthma,” says Harrison with a shrug. “He was an upper-class Englishman, and Monaco was where upper-class English people went.” He produces a letter from Bacon to his fellow artist Graham Sutherland, written shortly after his arrival here in 1946. “Bacon was 37, he’d destroyed almost everything he’d done up to that point. But here he is talking about what’s wrong with art at that time, with Picasso and all the French guys, about what we – by which he meant himself – must do in art. Up to that point he’s endlessly messed around, but here in Monaco he realised what his project was: to become the greatest artist of his time.”

Born in Dublin in 1909 to upper-class English parents, Bacon had a troubled relationship with his father, an army officer and racehorse trainer, who disapproved of his sensitive, “unmanly” second son. He may even have sexually abused him; a trauma that left Bacon, it has been speculated, with a lifelong yearning for a “cruel father” figure. Rather than going to art school or university, Bacon drifted between London, Paris and Berlin, eking out a tiny allowance from his mother with menial jobs, stints as a paid “gentleman’s companion” and bouts of shoplifting with Lightfoot.

In the late Twenties, he set himself up as a modernist interior designer, a role in which he had some success (despite his later claims to the contrary). Designing rugs led him to painting, and by the time of his move to Monaco he was established as an enfant terrible on London’s tiny avant-garde art scene. Indeed, he’d already created two of his defining works: the sinister Painting (1946), now in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, in which an ominous demagogic figure stands framed by two huge sides of meat, and Tate’s emblematic Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, with its howling mutant faces. Doesn’t that rather undermine the idea of “Francis Bacon” having been formed in Monaco?

“He knew he could do better than both those paintings. The MoMA Painting is interesting, but a bit of a mess,” says Harrison who, having spent 10 years on the catalogue raisonné, should know. “Three Figures is still heavily influenced by Picasso, and he arrived in Monaco with the intention of transcending that.”

The isolated figures and tortured surfaces of Bacon’s paintings have come to be seen as emblematic of the existential angst of post-war Europe, embodying the bleak residue left by the revelations of the Holocaust and the atom bomb. So it’s disconcerting to find him in the immediate aftermath of war not in chilly, bomb-ravaged austerity London, but in the relatively frivolous atmosphere of the Côte d’Azur. Monaco then must have been very different from what it is today: greener, less built-up, with much of its original elegance still intact – with more of a real sense, perhaps, of place. Bacon’s cultural and artistic tastes were resolutely Francophile; he was dismissive of almost all British art. But why did he move to Monaco, rather than the nearby and much livelier Nice, for example?

“He loved gambling and the casino in Monte Carlo is the most famous in the world,” says Harrison. “The Train Bleu, the sleeper from Paris, pulled in right beside the casino, and Bacon found trains, particularly night trains, sexy: you never knew who you would meet.”

Bacon recalled in an interview in 1962 that he became obsessed with Monte Carlo’s casino and spent whole days there at a time. “You could go in at 10 in the morning and needn’t come out till about four the following morning.”

Gambling appealed to his lifelong fascination with chance, in life and art, his sense of the cruel arbitrariness of existence. “He loved the exhilaration of roulette, staking everything on the spin of a wheel,” says Michael Peppiatt, who chronicled his 30-year friendship with the artist in the excellent memoir Francis Bacon in Your Blood. “He enjoyed it even when he lost. But he adored winning, of course, making an enormous amount of money through something so frivolous, then spending it all on champagne, taking people out to dinner and giving enormous tips.”

Studies from the Human Body, 1975Credit:
The Estate of Francis Bacon

After one particularly big win, Bacon went home with a handsome stranger, the owner, he said, of a yacht moored in the marina. After his departure, the Monaco police descended on Bacon’s apartment in search of the man, who was wanted all along the Riviera. “Francis enjoyed that,” says Peppiatt. “Monaco was a place apart, and it attracted louche people who he found intriguing: con men, doctors who’d perform not quite legal operations, the old women who queued to get into the casino every morning.”

But Bacon can’t have spent four years solely on gambling. “He was very disciplined,” says Peppiatt. “He needed the regularity of getting up early and painting every morning before lunch. And that came easiest to him in London. He always said he found it difficult to paint in strong light, which is why he did very little painting in Tangier, which he also visited very frequently.” Peppiatt, indeed, is sceptical that Bacon did much significant painting in Monaco, or that he spent years there at a time. The fact that Bacon maintained a London residence throughout this period, but lived at five different Monaco addresses, might seem to corroborate that view. The expense of such a lifestyle would have been considerable even without losses at the gambling tables, though Bacon was bankrolled, to a degree at least, by his lover Hall. An art collector and a director of the Peter Jones department store, Hall remains a shadowy figure, though like many of Bacon’s early patron-lovers – “sugar daddies,” Harrison calls them – he was married with children.

For Bacon, gambling was a means of self-exploration to be pursued no less obsessively than painting. In his mind the two activities were so closely entwined that losses at the roulette table were seen as collateral damage to success at the easel. Writing to a London dealer in 1947, having sustained heavy losses at the Monte Carlo Casino, he requested the then hefty price of £750 for a triptych on the grounds that this was “not one quarter of what (the paintings) have cost me with gambling etc”.

In Monaco, Bacon, who in Peppiatt’s words “saw himself as a person apart”, found a place apart, where he could immerse himself in his twin preoccupations, in light that gave him, as he wrote to his friend Sir Colin Anderson, the sense “of being on the edge of the real mystery”, yet where equally, as he told Graham Sutherland, “nobody is at all interested in ART, which is perhaps a comfort”. The private side of Bacon’s personality, which wouldn’t allow anyone to see him working, found in the principality a sense of energising detachment, an atmosphere which, as he told the critic David Sylvester years later, was “very good for pictures falling ready-made into the mind”.

The few surviving Monaco works illustrated in the catalogue raisonné are unresolved, though he is understood to have destroyed many others. Yet the stamp of a Nice framer on the back of the ferocious and unnerving Head II reveals that important work was done here. One of two paintings showing a chimpanzee’s bared teeth merging with a man’s head, it is so thickly impasted it was described by Bacon as “like rhino hide”. The companion work Head I contains the rudiments of an ornate chair or throne, suggesting it may have started out as one of the earliest of the reworkings of Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X that are among Bacon’s greatest works.

Bacon had painted the first of his “Popes” (Landscape with Pope/Dictator) shortly after his arrival in Monaco, a work reproduced for the first time in the catalogue raisonné. If it barely hints at the extraordinary things Bacon was to do with this image over the following decades, it nevertheless embodies the conflicts between spontaneity and order, brutality and impassivity, that were at the root of Bacon’s art and personality.

“He was debonair and sophisticated,” says Peppiatt. “He could be very charming, extremely generous and great fun to be with. But there was also a treacherous and destructive side to his personality, something diabolical. He pushed himself to the limits, and he pushed others to the limits too. You only have to look at the various suicides around him.”

These included his lover George Dyer, who killed himself in 1971, and Peter Lacy, considered the great love of Bacon’s life – his ultimate “cruel father” figure – who drank himself to death. If the latter wasn’t a suicide as such, Bacon, as Peppiatt observes, “certainly framed it as that in his own mind”. Lacy died in 1962, the year of Bacon’s breakthrough retrospective at the Tate, which also saw the beginning of the famous interviews with David Sylvester in which the artist consolidated the story of his life as he wished it be known – “the myth”, as Harrison puts it. “Before that it was all much less formal, wilder and more dangerous. But as Bacon didn’t keep diaries or records of any kind it’s hard to piece it together.” Bacon’s early years, not least his unlikely Monaco sojourn, are likely to remain a mystery.

Francis Bacon, Monaco and French Culture is at the Grimaldi Forum, Monaco until Sep 4 (grimaldiforum.com). The accompanying book, Francis Bacon: France and Monaco, ed. Martin Harrison, is published by Albin Michel at £35